In early August, Natty Light introduced a new entry to the hard seltzer game: the Catalina Lime Mixer.

Or, in other words, the best named hard seltzer beverage in all of history (you’ll know why if you Google “Catalina Wine Mixer”–simply brilliant).

The product is in direct competition with the most popular thing going: White Claws.

In fact, you may have seen this snarky video about White Claws earlier this year (side note: EVERY student in my class noted that they had already seen this video over the summer):

Here’s why I share this video (outside of the few laughs I hope you got out of it): The Claw sent a cease-and-decist letter to Mr. Wallace after this video. Essentially, giving him the full stiff arm.

Strange reaction, right? In 2019, you are much more likely to see a brand like White Claw embrace this video and sign up Wallace as a paid influencer to endorse the product. Instead, they told him to piss off.

And, Anheuser-Busch was right there to snatch him up.

When they did, they asked him to hop on a helicopter to attend the Catalina Wine Mixer (again, look it up) event they had planned on this yacht.

This was, by the accounts I’ve read so far, a big launch event for AB/Natty Light. A huge party aboard a luxury yacht. A big-time influencer showing up on a chopper. A boatload of influencers attending (check out the list on the Insta post). It has all the makings of a brilliant PR stunt-type idea. The type of stunt that should work well in the age of the influencer.

Except here’s the thing: I don’t see any influencers posting about it.

So, A+ for ideation, but maybe D- for execution?

We don’t know the whole story, obviously. That’s the tough part about evaluating these campaigns from afar. But, from what we can see, they seem to be missing a number of big components:

• More influencer posts. So they invite a long list of influencers to an awesome party on a huge yacht off the coast of California and no one is posting about it? Doesn’t that seem just a bit odd? Maybe there are bigger plans in the works. Maybe they plan to use content from the party in a TV ad coming up? Who knows. But, for now, not getting any influencer-generated content out of this event feels like a big miss.
• More social content. From what I can tell, Natty Light has only made that one Insta post and one Facebook post featuring the party. How is that even possible? You spend (most likely) tens of thousands of dollars to throw this lavish party. Most likely (again, guessing) pay a bunch of influencers tons of money to show up at this event and you…don’t document it at all? Seems odd, even though with liquor involved I’m sure there are laws and things they can’t do. With all that effort and money, you gotta get more out of it than a couple social media posts.
• Much more from Wallace. I would have doubled-down on Wallace content. And, maybe they will. The partnership is probably just getting started. But, this guy has an audience. And, he gets the humor around the product. I’d leverage that–while they can.